It was my birthday on Friday. Mostly, the day consisted of gloating over the rather dandy selection of presents which, er, presented themselves, together with far more cake-eating than is generally advisable, and a spot of pottering around the shops in Exeter (something I do increasingly rarely, though I’m delighted to find that a small shop to which I’ve been going since I first came to Devon in 1998 remains a dead-cert for me; it probably says it all that its defining feature when you walk through the door is the colourful nature of its goodies) followed by a walk at the sea as it was getting dark. These days, the witchling is a sufficiently confident walker that this means a hand held by each parent, and plenty of swinging over puddles. I couldn’t say for sure, but I suspect our glee probably equals her own.

Yesterday we did my official birthday treat, which consisted of a trip to the Yarner Trust‘s Christmas fair, up in North Devon. There was some lovelies on offer, including a felting kit which may have made its way into my sticky grasp (and with which I am hoping to create some felted dreadlocks to add to my collection; I never have taken the dreadlocked plunge, despite still lusting after my very own head of dreads, and given the witchling’s love of twiddling my hair, I don’t think the time is quite right at the moment, so I settle for felted dreads bound in amongst my hair in a – mostly futile – attempt to contain the follicular chaos), and we had a very nice lunch in Boscastle before walking the witchling down the harbour and back in the increasingly pouring rain.

The only slight downside to all this is that we’re all in varying stages of a rather unpleasant throat/cough/cold thing, for the second time in a month; the witchling felt more and more pathetic as bedtime drew near, and I felt rather shifty for having taken her out – I often find it hard to decide when to just think ‘to hell with it – out we go, and we’ll all be the better for it’, and when to just stay put and fester indoors. I tend to think fresh air and whatnot is no bad thing, and if I’m not well I do find it easiest to occupy ourselves by going out, rather than kicking about the house.

I’m really, really ready to get past this bit where we’re catching everything going, mind you – this autumn has been a bit of a joke, health-wise. We’ve gone from rarely being ill – I think the year before the witchling was born, we were completely cold-free, despite working in large open-plan offices with huge contingents of germs just waiting to pounce on one’s unsuspecting immune system – to barely recovering from one thing before the next one appears. I’ve just purchased a large and intimidating-looking bottle of Floradix, a vitamin-mineral-tonic-thingy which, if the taste is anything to go by, appears frighteningly good for one. I’ve also stocked up on extra fruit and veg – we normally manage veg with every meal, but other than apples, our fruit intake could be better, so it’s satsuma binge time. I suppose it’s the chronic tiredness that makes us easy targets for germs, but it really is getting tedious; I suspect my cough may indicate some sort of bronchial nonsense, which is just utterly loathsome. So, anyone out there got any suggestions for fighting this sort of thing off? My normal weapons – ginger, honey, lemon, garlic, fruit and veg and Eating Properly And None Of That Junk You Think Will Give You Energy – just don’t seem to be keeping things at bay…

Urgle. No idea where the last week went, apart from the bit that I spent in West Sussex, isolated from the pernicious influences of the internet and all that sparkles therein. This made me realise, once again, how much time I spend pratting about online when I should be getting on with the things I constantly moan about not having time for. Gods, what a sentence. I spent evenings reading (three entire books knocked off in the space of five days, which is pretty good going, even by my speed-reading standards) and knitting, with the result that I’ve finished the back and half of the front of a cardigan for the tiny daughter, and I’ve decided to keep up this rather lower-profile internet useage. For one thing, it makes me value the time I do spend online, rather than just obsessively hitting ‘refresh’ on my feed reader, and it also means that we’re back to spending evenings DOING THINGS together, rather than slumped in front of some film or other, courtesy of various websites. It’s funny – when we got rid of our telly, both Quercus and I felt good about it, not least as we’d hardly watched it for months. But then, when I’m tired and not getting much sleep, I seem to gravitate towards the internet in much the same way that I would have used television in days gone by – not activity, as such, but a sort of real-life-is-paused thing that lets you off the hook of living. Well, enough, says I. I reclaim the time I spend reading Go Fug Yourself (which is mostly about people I’ve never heard of, anyway), and I claw back the hours lost to Facebook and Twitter (which has never really caught me in the way it has others, but which is still handy for procrastination purposes), and I brandish knitting needles and crafty bits and bobs, and I depart the parish to prepare bits of card for the tiny daughter and I to attempt to transform into an advent calendar later on. (And no, I have not turned to the church for comfort in my hour of need, but I do like to celebrate seasonal whatsits, and the notion of advent calendars thus appeals to my generally-ridiculously-excited affection for midwinter.)

I hasten to add that I don’t consider this blog, nor my reading of other people’s blogs and the commenting thereon, to be part of my problematic nonsense time online; genuine interaction I value very highly, but pratting about on sites in which I’m not even really interested, simply because I can’t be arsed to get off my backside and get on with things, despite feeling shitty about not doing so, is just not on. So there. Also, I am determined that the tiny daughter shan’t be exposed to the internet to the extent that it becomes part of the background noise that other people experience as the constantly-on television; the last thing I want is for her to feel that she’s not interesting enough to be put before the compulsive checking of email. So, it’s back to basics: no iBook if she’s awake, apart from the odd phone number-checking moment, or things of that ilk.

Right. As you were. And coming soon: oak kitchens, the building thereof; multicoloured tiles, the drooling over thereof; chocolate fudge, the vast consumption thereof; and many more such nonsensical things, as the fancy taketh me.

How are you all?

This morning I found an onion. Well, what had once been an onion, if I’m honest. It had wedged itself inside the top of the hoover’s stupid hose thing and hidden there while putrefaction set in. It’s understandable, in a way. Here we are, knee-deep in sawdust and removing mouse entrails from under the table saw, and it’s week two (or three, I forget) of the kitchen-building extravaganza. I would quite like to hide in the hoover while putrefaction sets in. I’m trying to be all stoic and British about it, but sometimes it’s a bit challenging, if I’m honest. We’ve been living in a house which many would consider fairly buggered for about five years now, and while the new extension has meant lots of bits which were very revolting met their timely demise, its construction has also introduced levels of chaos which we’d never encountered with the old, known-if-revolting-quantity version.

Of course, when you decide to self-build an extension which, when finished, accounts for forty per cent of your whole house, you sort of cast aside minor considerations like, oh, spare time, and surfaces which aren’t covered in debris of some sort, and that happy (if unrecognised) time when you weren’t familiar with the entire Screwfix catalogue. The old extension was tiny, damp, freezing, and covered in mould. The new kitchen is fifteen by seventeen-odd feet, with a notch of about, er, bathroom doorway size. (I am not a surveyor. Dimensions do not always come easily to me, and Quercus is on the ginger wine, so any estimate/memory he might offer will have been pleasantly eroded by this stage.) The old bathroom was five feet square, while the new one is about seven by nine-and-a-bit feet, and it has built-in storage galore, so that’s the empty space I’m quoting, not the space into which one fits the usual crud encountered in bathrooms. We have a lot more space, and a lot more sense of space, courtesy of the high ceiling that having a single-storey extension – the roof-line of which is just under the second-storey thatch – creates.

The thing is, though, that when you’re living in the place that you’re renovating, it’s a bit of a bastard keeping a sense of it being your home as well as a site. If we could just bugger off and live in another house while doing this one, it would be so much simpler, not least because the rest of our house is pretty tiny (our sitting room, for example, is about twelve by nine feet, and it’s the biggest room in the original house, while the dining room is about eight by nine, with the understairs cupboard taken out of that). Instead, the entire house gets routinely coated in the dust which one or other of the many processes involved in replacing the old, the buggered, the just abysmally manky. First, there was the dust of taking off old render and exposing cob walls which hadn’t seen the light of day for probably fifty years. No – wait. First there was the dust which knocking out the ghastly fireplace created. From a foot-square aperture to the inglenook which now houses our woodstove, via several tons of dust, debris, and old render (sensing a pattern?), we decided that going back to the original opening would not only give us more space (it’s not useful space, but in a house where every space has to be used, in the normal way of things, for built-in cupboards and innovative storage solutions designed to mitigate the sense of smallness that one otherwise encounters, some useless space is actually a luxury), but would create a fireplace worth really getting to know, rather than one which was just functional.

So, that was dusty. Re-rendering was, well, a post in its own right, as I’ve already written below. Building the extension wasn’t dusty so much as being quite interesting with a tiny baby; I think back to this time last year, when the tiny daughter and I were hopping in the bath with no walls between us and the kitchen and no back door. Oh, and when the walls were all studwork and this interesting green plasticky stuff which acts as a vapour barrier in timber-frame builds. And now we’re into the bit where Quercus is spending every spare minute machining wood and working out joints and whatnot, and I’m sort of faffing about with a duster from time to time while looking mildly distressed and noting the mould on the windowsills which is there, I think, largely because we can’t easily reach said windowsills to clean them, and the building isn’t really getting what one might describe as normal use, because we can’t open windows (see aforementioned reaching issues), and about two-thirds of the entire space is taken up with tools or materials. (Currently, getting to the sort-of-installed sink involves climbingto one side and then cautiously stepping around a pile of oak planks about twelve feet long and three feet tall, before navigating the perils of the sticky-outy corners of the table saw.) The kitchen, as in the functional part in which we prepare food, consists of a four-foot re-used worktop from the old extension propped up on chipboard; the two-ring Baby Belling Of Woe lives on one end, and underneath is a riot of cat food, poultry supplies, vegetables and goats’ milk, together with the (useless and ridiculously loud, and that was before the onion moved in) hoover and sundry things which have yet to find a permanent home. We have one – admittedly large – cupboard for storing food, crockery, pans and cleaning stuff. It’s bedlam in there, and I try to avoid ever looking in the very bottom part of it, because if I were a creature with lots of legs and a worrying tendency to click upon moving, that is where I would be, for sure.

I know one has a natural tendency to think that the proverbial grass – in this case, the day when we finish this house – is greener, and that if one can just get on to The Next Bit, life will suddenly become simple, straightforward, rewarding and purposeful, but sometimes I do think that surely, life must be simpler than this when you’re just not doing work on your house all the time. I’d just like a year or so, after this bit, of Just Living. Doing things like planting the garden up again. Growing veggies. Being worried when we forget to water the tomatoes. Maybe even ironing. (Actually, no. No. Sorry. What was I thinking?) You know, just normal, ordinary stuff. Not even the fun stuff. (Because in fairness, we do have a lot of fun, and I’m sure that we not only went round twice in the queue for our allocation, but maybe even beat a few people up and stole their quotas too when it comes to laughing.) Oh, for the day when this bit is finished. Keep your fingers crossed, folks – the plan is to try to get the kitchen units built and the new oven installed by Christmas (which would be just as well on two fronts: first, the roast dinner I misguidedly undertook on Saturday took THREE FECKING HOURS TO COOK, and second, the very lovely electrical superstore from which we bought our cooker wrote to us this morning to alert us to the fact that our year’s guarantee is about to expire. As we’ve yet to see if the fucker even works, it’d probably be a good idea to find out while it’s under warranty, non?). If so, I shall celebrate with a veritable orgy of cooking. If not, I shall do something involving ginger wine, tried patience, and that fucking Baby Belling, I daresay.

Finally I managed to achieve the impossible: remembering – on a day where the rain wasn’t quite as stair-rod-like as it has been in recent weeks – not only to find the camera, but to recharge the batteries, and to take pictures of the house while there was (sort of) sunshine to set off the newly-lime-washed walls.

Of course, I digressed, and ended up with pictures of the toadstool (?) ring which has sprung up among the long grass further up the lane, and of the storm clouds closing in from the west, and of the sunshine which lurked about the trees despite the impending downpour, and of the tiny daughter, snuggled up against my back while wearing possibly the world’s sweetest little red velvet coat (complete with bear ears, though don’t ask me which sort of bear is red velvet and approximately 2′ 4″). But hey – digression is something of a habit after years as an arts student, so I’ll let myself off, and continue to bask in the smugness of having uploaded various pictures for posts I haven’t even written yet. That never happens.

We managed three coats of limewash before we declared for now; I think the spring will probably see us adding another two or three coats, just to be on the safe side, but at least we’re (reasonably) happy that the lime render is now weatherproofed for this winter, and, while the windows are creating miniature lakes on the windowsills each morning, the damp should begin to ease up a bit now that the walls are at least able to breath in one direction. Next summer we’re going to render the inside of the house too; the walls are currently clad in a thick layer of very damp and crumbly plaster (the nature of which will remain unclear until we take some of the wallpaper off – it could be lime, it could be gypsum), and then some deeply unpleasant wallpapering. Most of the horrendousness of the wallpaper is aesthetic, I confess, and we dealt with it in the short term by simply painting everything white, but of course that does little to solve the fact that our walls are wearing rubber gloves, effectively, instead of enjoying the breathability that cob needs. So, we’ll plaster the walls with lime, and replace the ceilings (some of which are now very tentative indeed), and paint with something nice (possibly more casein distemper, which is just lovely to use, and which, I learn from the wonders of Google, one can make oneself, should one care to travel even further down the route of knitting one’s own lentils while bathing in homemade granola).

So, from crumbling render and cracked cob walls, we move to the wondrousness of walls which are clothed in sunlight. (Just don’t get me started on the prospect of the combined appeal of a render gun, low ceilings and interior spaces; for me, the pain is still too near.)

Update

Quercus left a comment on this post saying how I hadn’t really explained how utterly miserable a task re-rendering a cob house is. You know, I think he’s right. I didn’t mention the muck – constant mud, everywhere, mixed with the sandy grit needed to make up the render, and a light dusting of sort of dried slip over most surfaces, including your arms, hair, face and ankles, despite a full-body suit of the sort used for farm inspections – and I didn’t mention the woe of passing a loaded render gun (weighing probably thirty pounds) up a scaffold tower when balanced rather precariously on an up-ended plank in order to reach as high as possible so that Quercus, himself at full stretch leaning down, didn’t fall into the waiting barrow of render perched just beneath the scaffold. I also didn’t mention the noise of the compressor, which sounds like a small lorry, running for hours on end, and pausing only to squeal in an alarming my-belt-is-going manner from time to time, just to freak its non-compressor-savvy owners out. I also didn’t mention that we’ve utterly broken our garden – we had one patch of niceness left before the rendering, where the tiny daughter and I used to sit when Quercus was doing something more fun, like, oh I don’t know, knocking the old render off the house or chainsawing wood for the winter or something, and that patch ended up being the second spot we used for mixing up the render; it’s covered in a reasonably thick layer of lime slurry, and there’s no way it’ll be turned around by the spring, I fear.

But.

Still.

We did it all ourselves (mostly Quercus), and we saved ourselves £20,000 in the process, as well as learning a hell of a lot about our cob house that we wouldn’t have known if we’d just paid someone. (To say nothing of the fact I’d be writing this from behind bars, post-necessary-bank job.)

I’ve seen a new meme floating around the atmos in the last few days, one which focuses on what people are reading, and what their little ones are reading too. I’m not feeling collected enough to join in officially, but I did want to witter on about a couple of books, so this seems an apt time to do so.

The tiny daughter’s favourite thing is a book. She also likes her lighthouse (which, consisting of wooden rings of different colours, is one of my favourites too), and her wooden hedgehog (which is also wooden rings, one each of red, two shades of orange and yellow, but with the added bonus of varying numbers of holes drilled into them so that in order to fit on the hedgehog’s base, the alignment must also be sorted out the right way; this has kept her going back for more when I think other stacking toys might have become dull by now), but still, if she’s ever bored or fractious, a book is the first thing we go for. Recently, her ability to look you in the eye, attempting to keep the tell-tale grin off her face before she beetles off around the corner to run away and hide, has only added to the utter joy I feel when we sit down to read together.

Current favourites are Pumpkin Soup by Helen Cooper, No Matter What by Debi Gliori, and Keep Love in Your Heart, Little One by Giles Andreae and Clara Vulliamy. Of course, they’re partly my favourites, too – the illustrations for all three are just so scrumptious that I want to climb into the pages and set up house there. I mean, look at these, from Keep Love in Your Heart:*

Big is even wearing striped socks. What’s not to like?

As for reading material of a more adult nature, well, I’m struggling at the moment. I read Stef Penney’s The Tenderness of Wolves and really enjoyed it; in fact, I intended to do take part in A Clever and Intelligent Discussion of It in October, but somehow that fell by the wayside. Since then, I’ve read A Gathering Light by Jennifer Donnelly, and enjoyed that too, but now I’m back to re-reading H. Potter (currently, The Deathly Hallows), and I could do with some recommendations. Recent enjoyments have included (and I feel I should feel shame at this, yet I don’t, somehow) the Twilight saga (saga – !), but I could do with something a little meatier to get my teeth into, I think. Suggestions, anyone?

* Yes, I am aware of the slightly cloying nature of this title, and yes, there was a time in my life when I probably would have vomited at the very mention of such a phrase, but hey, such is life – I’m a hypocrite.

A while back, I mentioned the chocolate ginger cake I made for Quercus’s birthday. Oh, the chocolateyness of it. Oh, the gingerification of it. Folks, it was, put simply, such stuff as dreams are made on. Anyway, in the absence of anything remotely interesting to say about anything else, I thought I’d offer it up here, on a virtual plate, for your cooking – and scarfing – enjoyment. Of course, anything ginger gets a get-out-of-accusations-of-piggery-free card, courtesy of it being the time of year when one catches all sorts of nasty cough-related bugs, and ginger being a most lovely way to attempt to ward such nasties off. Of course the second, it’s also a very good way to worm your way into your loved ones’ affections – providing cake is always a winner, no?

In other news, well, still coughing. Today I caved and started to take the antibiotics. I’ve been coughing for ten days; enough is enough, I suppose. It’s all very tedious. Never mind. There is tea; there is ginger; there is, then, hope.

Chocolate Ginger Loveliness

Get mits on:
200g dark chocolate;
200g brown sugar;
200g butter;
A tbsp self-raising wholemeal flour;
Three large eggs;
Four of those knobbly bits of ginger you get in a jar of preserved ginger, together with a good ol’ slurp of the liquid too.

Then…
Melt the chocolate with the butter in a manner which doesn’t involve the woodburner, a lot of spitting butter, and the too-late realisation that washing is within spitting range. Stick the ginger into a small bowl and – assuming you’ve got one – blitz the hell out of it with one of those natty little hand-held blitzy things which are probably officially meant only for blending soup. Warning: ginger really travels in this situation. Sling the resulting goop in with the sugar, then stick in in the melted chocolate and butter mixture, before beating in the eggs and the flour. Select a tin of your choice – ours was a slightly battered square number – about eight inches across, and stick it in t’oven for about, well, the timing is probably highly oven-specific, to be honest; our oven being the shite pile of crapness that it is, it took about forty minutes, but a decent version might manage to cook this to perfection in half that. The idea is that the top looks slightly cracked, but the inside remains a sticky gooey loveliness. You get the idea. Anyway. Retrieve from oven. Poke suspiciously with soon-to-be-burnt finger, and indulge in any loose bits (purely for research, you understand), before scoffing as much as you think you can remove without being detected in your gluttony.

1. I really, really like Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are. To the extent that I’m not at all sure about a film version.

2. It’s been raining here. A lot. The windows we spent weeks stripping and repairing are getting covered in condensation pretty much all day, every day, and we’re wondering if the glass isn’t sealed well enough. We’re also wondering what the buggery to do about it if the quantity of water has nothing to do with sealing, and is instead caused by the fact that it’s single-glazing glass, and it’s really, really thin, because that’s what Listed Buildings insisted on, regardless of the fact that this may well lead to the destruction of the original frames.

3. Quercus is bashing on with the kitchen – the sink is in place, even if not finally, and we are getting the carcasses in place. Suddenly there is an impression of what the space will be, when it’s all done, and it’s a good feeling.

4. I have been meaning to take pictures of the house from various angles, to share the gorgeous all-singing-all-dancing lime rendering we’ve done over this summer, but see point 2 re rain, the persistent presence thereof.

5. Ginger cordial with hot water and honey is the world’s best sore throat treatment. I have now got a prescription of amoxycillin to go at, but am debating whether or not to take it; rampant sore throat and hacking cough aside, I think I’ll shake off the horribleness of not being well in the next day or two, and I do loathe antibiotics.

6. I’m really bored with being ill now. It doesn’t take long for the novelty of sitting in bed at odd times of day to wear off, does it? Not well enough to want to DO anything, but not ill enough to escape finger-gnawing cabin fever.

7. The tiny daughter and I did a pumpkin together on Saturday afternoon. It went pretty well – she only attempted to eat the flesh once, and we managed to roast the seeds to great effect. Less successful was the  cooking of the pumpkin itself – combined with ginger and cinnamon, the overall effect was still pretty grim. Hey ho – perhaps pumpkins and I are destined to enjoy a relationship based on two things: candles and compost heaps.

8. Is it too predictable to say that I’m quite enjoying Eastwick, a television series based on John Updike’s book The Witches of Eastwick, but that I find the casting of that chap who will always be Benton Fraser as Darryl van Horne a little distracting?

9. I think I’ve lost my knitting mojo, temporarily; I want – in theory – to start knitting the tiny daughter the cardigan I’ve probably mentioned here already, but I just can’t seem to pull my finger out. Instead, I cast on procrastinatory bits and bobs – another hat, for example – but none of these bits and bobs is actually on The List Of Things Which I Am Going To Knit, a list which exists purely to stop me starting things and then realising I’m wasting time, or that they mean the outlay of money, when other projects could be knitting for (what feels like) free (because it’s ages since I shelled out for the materials involved, and thus… yes, I’m revealing way too much about the inner nuttiness of my financial reasonings here, aren’t I? Let’s draw a veil over this bit, and move on…).

10. Do you ever just find that, despite a genuine preference for wholefoods and home-cooked food and general smug lentil-knitting-type living, you just wish you lived next door to a really good pizza takeaway?